Federal Councils in the legislative branch

In the US, we are accustomed to two chambers of the Legislature, but most countries have only one. The framers of the Constitution copied Great Britain's model of a legislature with two chambers. The purpose was to represent two different voting segments, the state legislatures and the landowners. The Senate was elected by the state legislatures and the House of Representatives was elected by the white, male, landowners in each state. Now, the members of both the Senate and the House are elected by the same group of people, the citizens. Two segments of voters no longer exist.

Our Collaborative Democracy would have only one group of voters or decision makers, the citizens. Therefore, there would be no need to create a balance of power. Developing solutions to the same issue in different chambers using the same group of decision makers wouldn't make sense. Maintaining two chambers would be redundant, pointless, and confusing. Even now, there is no material difference between the activities of the House and the Senate. Their operations and committees are redundant and the duplication is wasteful and counterproductive. Therefore, only one chamber would be needed where the citizens make the laws. The Legislature would become a unicameral legislature with only one legislative body called the "Legislature."

Legislative committees

The new unicameral Legislature would have a 9-member Federal Council representing the Legislature as a whole and one for each committee. The Legislative Council would not choose and pass bills on to the committees as the chambers do now. Each committee would have its own Citizen Governance Website for its area of responsibility. Therefore, issues would be organized under the committees and all interested citizens would have a voice in the solution of each specific issue.

Committees would have the ability to plan and coordinate with other committees, but each would act as a "mini legislature" of the people, facilitating solutions by the people within their area of responsibility. If committees disagreed on which committee had the responsibility for an issue, the Legislative Council would decide. If an issue crossed multiple committee boundaries, it would be solved through the Citizen Governance Website of the Legislature instead of a committee.

As all of the people would create new laws together and everyone would have a voice, there would be no review or veto by the Legislative Council or the Presidential Council. Otherwise, if any individual or council had power to change or negate what the people decided, then political parties and special interests could gain control and rule as they do now. As you recall, interference by politicians is what ruined many citizen initiative and participatory budgeting programs around the world.

Subcommittees

Each committee would have the power to form whatever subcommittees it deemed were necessary to accomplish its tasks with approval by the Legislative Council. Each subcommittee would be a Federal Council. The committee would determine the number of members on the subcommittee with a minimum of 5. There would be one pool of qualified candidates for each committee and for all its subcommittees combined.

Congressional staff

The Legislative Council, committees, and subcommittees would all have the ability to hire staff as needed as they do now just as all Federal Councils would. For example, staff might include a staff director, Citizen Governance Website moderators, solution process facilitators, legal counsel, and professional experts. Currently, about 7,700 staff members are employed by the House and 5,900 by the Senate. Of these, the House has about 1,200 committee staff and the Senate has about 950. [3] There are also about 500 staffers listed as "leadership staff" and "officers of the house" in the House and about 1,000 in the Senate. Members of the House hire about 6,000 personal staffers and members of the Senate hire about 3,900 totaling almost 10,000 personal staffers. That adds up to 25,000 total staff employed today.

Given that few committees would remain as described next, we cannot estimate the exact number of staffers and council members needed in the Legislature, but a substantial reduction in committees, subcommittees and their staff positions is likely because we will eliminate redundancy.